Women will still be alluring, food will still be delicious, and Michaelangelo's David will still be beautiful, no matter how well you describe these phenomenon.
I hate to pick on petty details, but I've been pondering the absence of women here lately and this sort of thing really does add up to a sense of being an outsider. This is awfully male/hetero-centric. (I somehow don't get the feeling that "you" here is a lesbian or bi woman. I guess I could be mistaken.)
Being handed that sense of outsider-ness is really distracting from the rest of your post. Which I will now read more carefully in an attempt to focus on your actual point instead of petty details.
Point of curiosity: Have I ever done this? I usually try to avoid this sort of thing but of course it's not always conscious either.
I'm genuinely puzzled by this sort of hostile reaction to what was really a pretty mild request for gender neutral language/examples. It seems utterly out of proportion to the original comment(s).
Clearly, any example one comes up with is probably capable of somehow excluding someone, and trying to screen off all possible objections seems unduly onerous given (a) it's damn near impossible; and (b) the benefits of not excluding left-handed hermaphrodite axylotl enthusiasts are, all things considered, rather small.
But that's not quite what we're talking about. While women are certainly scarce on LW, in other parts of the world, they comprise roughly half the population. And using gender neutral language/examples is really easy - much easier than jumping through actual hoops, and probably also easier than writing comments telling people how annoyed you are about their nitpicking. The cost-benefit analysis here seems pretty straightforward.
So why does this seem to annoy (some) people so much?
Is the problem that you actually think it's illegitimate for people to be bothered by stuff like this? Seriously? Wanting to be included is illegitimate? Wow. I guess it's easy to think that things don't matter when they don't systematically affect you personally, but still.
I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience.
When I write I generally do not consider the gender of my audience one way or the other. Since I happen to be male I would think, "Oh, females are alluring," and use the example. I expect I would do this even talking to a room full of nothing but hetero-women.
But thinking about it as addressing the audience makes more sense of the distraction. I guess I am not so much male-centric as self-centric? Silly me, generalizing from one example and assuming everyone else writes the way I have been.
Well, thanks for the input.
I just got off the phone with my mom.
Mom: You're working hard on your PhD, aren't you?
Me: Yes, ma there's lots to do. Oh and I put in a paper for a conference. If it gets accepted I'll go to America to present it.
Mom: Of course it will get accepted. You're working so hard, won't God listen to you?
Everything comes from God. Forget making amazing awe-inspiring monuments. Writing a paper on air pollution in London comes from Him. Getting to go to a conference comes from Him.
My mom can't truly appreciate what I do. Because fundamentally, at the gut level, she can't get that I can accomplish anything. It's arrogant for me to even think I could do anything without Lord Krishna's supreme flute inspired magic.
Now that's a problem I want to solve.
there's a warm fuzziness to life that science just doesn't seem to get
Not true. Science helps create new warm fuzzies whereas religion has been re-using the same old one for millennia. The problem with religion is not that it lets people have warm fuzzies but that it provides false explanations.
For example, the building in Ireland that is discussed in the first BHTV episode: I imagine the warm fuzzies one gets on visiting that place are to do with the atmosphere that has been created, that rare experience of the sunlight breaking through carefully craf...
I think this post made some very good points and I've voted it up, but I want to pick a nit with the mention of "your five senses". Thats Aristotelean mythology. We have many more than five, and so could you please edit this to just read "your senses"?
(Actually, since I'm posting this, I should mention I don't believe in qualia either, but that is a debate of an entirely different order).
The view that shattering mysteries reduces their value is very much a result of religion trying to protect itself.
Yes, but this tendency to see warm fuzzies as depending on mystery is even deeper than religion. It's a common anti-intellectual tendency. Take, for example, the idea that attempting to scientifically understand phenomena like romantic love will "spoil the mystery."
In general, I've never seen understanding a phenomenon better get in the way of appreciating it. The only exception would be when you are trying to analytically figure ...
The main problem is viewing this warm fuzziness as a "mystery." This warm fuzziness, as an experience, is a reality. It's part of that set of things that doesn't go away no matter what you say or think about them.
I'm not sure I agree with this. How you feel about religion is very strongly driven by what you think about it. If you think it is the truth then religion is awesome and profound, if you think its a constructed mythology then probably not so much. I'd suggest even the very fact that it is a "mysterious truth", adds to the en...
Calling what the "tolerate parts of religion" side values in this debate "warm, soft, fuzzies" should be considered rationalist taboo, if it isn't already. This is a way of diminishing the concerns of the other side by giving them a different name instead of providing reasons why those concerns are unimportant.
We should all stop offering up Tolkien as great literature. He isn't. His characters are flat and the writing is overwrought and dull. Besides, his audience is niche where the Bible's really isn't. Use Shakespeare, Dostoevsky,
The position, as far as I can see, isn't that warm fuzziness is itself mysterious; it's that some mysterious phenomena cause warm fuzziness, possibly because they leave room for the imagination to fill in things more wonderful than the reality. We seem to mostly have run out of such things in the modern world, so maybe the solution is to create more things to be ignorant about.
The view that shattering mysteries reduces their value is very much a result of religion trying to protect itself.
Or perhaps it's the result of this view sometimes being plainly true, as borne out by experience.
I've never been religious, and I've experienced firsthand that it's entirely possible for something to become less beautiful if you understand it better.
I listen to a fair number of Japanese songs. There are songs I have specifically not looked up translations for, because even though the song will still be beautiful either way, there's a unique ...
Frank's point got rather lost in all this. It seems to be quite simple: there's a warm fuzziness to life that science just doesn't seem to get, and some religious artwork touches on and stimulates this warm fuzziness, and hence is of value
I got the feeling that Eliezer was deliberately avoiding this point, or that he didn't understand it. Though, maybe not. I'd like to see a round three that focuses solely on this issue, with less random distractions. Frank was certainly guilty of distracting from this point by piling on lots of other, less relevant points.
Reaction to: Yudkowsky and Frank on Religious Experience, Yudkowksy and Frank On Religious Experience Pt 2, A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies
Frank's point got rather lost in all this. It seems to be quite simple: there's a warm fuzziness to life that science just doesn't seem to get, and some religious artwork touches on and stimulates this warm fuzziness, and hence is of value.1 Moreover, understanding this point seems rather important to being able to spread an ideology.
The main problem is viewing this warm fuzziness as a "mystery." This warm fuzziness, as an experience, is a reality. It's part of that set of things that doesn't go away no matter what you say or think about them. Women (or men) will still be alluring, food will still be delicious, and Michaelangelo's David will still be beautiful, no matter how well you describe these phenomenon. The view that shattering mysteries reduces their value is very much a result of religion trying to protect itself. EY is probably correct that science will one day destroy this mystery as it has so many others, but because it is an "experience we can't clearly describe" rather than an actual "mystery," the experience will remain. The argument is with the description, not the experience; the experience is real, and experiences of its nature are totally desirable.
The second, sub-point: Frank thinks that certain religious stories and artwork may be of artistic value. The selection of the story of Job is unfortunate, but both speakers value it for the same reason: its truth. One sees it as true (and inspiring) and likes it, the other sees it as false (and insidious) and hates it. I think both agree that if you put it on the shelf next to Tolkien, and rational atheists still buy it and enjoy it, hey, good for Job. And if not, well, throw it out with the rest of the trash.
Frank also has a point about rationality not being the only way to view the world. I think he's once again right, he's just really, tragically bad at expressing his point without borrowing heavily from religion. His point seems to be that rationality isn't the only way to *experience* the world, which is absolutely, 100% right. You don't experience the world through rationality. You experience it through your senses and the qualia of consciousness. Rationality is how you figure out what's going on, or what's going to be going on, or what causes one thing to happen and not another. Appreciating art, or food, or sex, or life is not generally done by applying rationality. Rationality is extremely useful for figuring out how to get these things we like, or even figure out what things we should like, but it doesn't factor into the qualitative experience of those things in most cases. For many people it probably doesn't factor into the enjoyment of anything. If you don't embrace and explain this distinction, you come out looking like Spock.
This seems to be a key point atheists fail to communicate, because it is logically irrelevant to the truth of their propositions. A lot of people avoid decisions that they believe will destroy everything that makes them happy, and I'm not sure we can blame them. It's important to explain that you can still have all kinds of warm fuzziness, and, even better, you can be really confident it's well-founded and avoid abysmal epistemology, too! Instead, the atheist tries to defeat some weird, religiously-motivated expression of warm fuzziness, and that becomes the debate, and people like their fuzzies.
We experience warm fuzziness directly,2 through however our brains work. No amount of science is likely to change that, no matter how well it understands the phenomenon. This is a good thing for science, and it's a good thing for warmth and fuzziness.
1- I have admittedly not read his book. It's quite possible he's advocating we actually go through religion and make it fit our current sensibilities, then take it as uber-fiction. If that's the case, I have serious problems with it. If that's not the case, and he just thinks that some of it contains truth/beauty/is salvagable as literature, then I have serious problems with the argumentum-ad-hitlerum employed against him, as it seems to burn a straw man.
2 - I'm not saying there's warm fuzziness in the territory and we put it in our map. There's something in the territory that, when we map it out, the mapping causes us to directly experience a feeling of warm fuzziness.